Diana and Leo

About the Book

Diana and Leo is the sequel to The Alchemist and the Silurist, a historical novel based on the sometimes tortured life of Thomas Vaughan, the 17th-century Welsh Anglican pastor, who became obsessed with alchemy, and his twin brother Henry, the mystical poet known as the Silurist. Stories of the controversial alchymist Thomas Vaughan were revived and embellished some two-hundred years after his death by a rougish French writer named Gabrielle Jogand-Pages who, under the pen name Leo Taxil, created elaborate hoaxes, pitting Freemasons against Catholics. Taxil published a series of salacious and ficticious accounts of the imagined activities of a young American girl named Diana Vaughan, who had journeyed to Paris hoping to prove her kinship to the 17th-century Welsh scientist. The novels were written by 83-year-old James E. Vaughan, a distant kinsman of the twins, after twenty years of careful and exhaustive research.

About the Author

James E. Vaughan was born and reared in eastern Kentucky. He attended Michigan State College and served in the U. S. Navy during World War II, achieving the rank of lieutenant (jg). He received his BA in mathematics and physics from Oklahoma University in 1947, and his MSE degree in 1962. He managed a commercial broadcast station in Miami, Florida for a time before moving with his wife Wanda Lee to an Arkansas farm in 1955, where he lived for 50 years, teaching and writing. He now resides in Jonesboro, Arkansas. He was a member of the Arkansas Educational Telecommunications Commission from 1980 to 1988, and played a major role in establishing a statewide academic competition known as Quiz Bowl, which endures to this day.

“A Study of Vocabulary Improvement Techniques” was published in the NSPI Journal No. 6 in 1968. Over a period of some twenty years he authored more than 60 instructional books, including “Mr. Ready” and “Mr. Phun Phonics” (AudioActive, 1975). Ceres: A Space Odyssey, a software program for Apple II computers, was included in NASA’s Second Edition of Software for Aerospace Education in 1990 (p.24, Section 1).  His first work of fiction, a political story titled The Polemicists, won the 1993 Heartland Writers’ Guild award for Contemporary Fiction. In 1996 his mystery story, “The Case of La Grande Dame,” was selected from more than 300 submissions to The New Yorker magazine for publication in an anthology. His Bankmules: The Story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town was published in 2003 by Jesse Stuart Foundation. The Alchymist and The Silurist was his first published novel (2008).

Diana and Leo is the sequel to The Alchymist and The Silurist. Writing under the pen name Leo Taxil and other pseudonyms, Gabrielle Jogand-Pages pitted Catholics against Freemasons in a series of salacious stories involving Diana Vaughan, a supposed descendant of the Alchymist.

Readers of the novels who wish to learn more about the lives of Thomas and Henry Vaughan and their line of descent from Sir Roger Vaughan will be interested in The Vaughan Family in Wales and America by James E. Vaughan, which is also published and distributed by Trafford Publishing. Information on the latter may be found on the Internet at www.trafford.com/08-0951 or by calling toll-free 1-888-232-4444.